Farmer Cortopassi gets his day in court

Dino Cortopassi sat in the front row of the courtroom, watching his attorneys in action. Then, at last, it was time to testify.

Alex Breitler

Dino Cortopassi sat in the front row of the courtroom, watching his attorneys in action. Then, at last, it was time to testify.

The wealthy and outspoken farmer took the stand in a civil trial this week, five years after he sued the state government for failing to remove decades worth of mud and silt from Delta waterways.

The 75-year-old Cortopassi's passionate quest is to prove that the Mokelumne River where it passes his 3,000-acre ranch is unnecessarily choked with sediment, straining the levees and increasing the risk of a flood.

He blames the problem on the State Water Project, a sprawling system of reservoirs and canals that sucks water through the Delta, dropping fine pieces of sand and clay that eventually accumulate into muck on the bottom of streams and sloughs.

Cortopassi may not be a scientist, but his attorneys tried to establish his credibility as a longtime "swamp rat" (his term, not theirs) who understands the Delta and is intimate with its rivers.

"In my experience, an awful lot of understanding about water is by doing," Cortopassi said on the stand. "Those who haven't done, really haven't learned."

Cortopassi wants Judge Linda Lofthus to order the state to dredge the channels around his ranch. Once common practice in the Delta, dredging has decreased over the past 20 years due to stricter environmental regulations.

He acquired his Canal Ranch in 2005, just months before the river swelled in a near-flood. Cortopassi spent $3.1 million reinforcing the levees afterward, according to his attorney, Kenneth Hedberg.

But that incident also launched Cortopassi on a path toward investigating what was really going on in the river.

He testified that he discovered siphons could not pump water because the river bottom was higher than the intake.

"How could the bottom of the channel be 2 or 3 feet higher than the pipe?" he said. "Either the person putting it in didn't know a damn thing ... or that dirt came from someplace."

He said the South Fork of the Mokelumne is now so shallow that you can walk across 90 percent of it at low tide.

"The tenant manager threw a stick and had his dog run across it," Cortopassi said.

His legal team also submitted photos purporting to show a motorboat stuck in the middle of the Mokelumne and a man standing beside the boat with water up to his knees.

Cortopassi's wife, Joan, his four children and some employees were in court to watch his testimony, after years of effort and - as he said in 2011, "enormous personal expense" - to bring the case to that point.

Cortopassi went so far as to commission a $200,000-plus bathymetric study of the river - a kind of sonar test measuring the underwater landscape. He compared the results with a more primitive 1934 study and determined the bottom of the river has gone up over time.

"(The state) has studied this problem, they know this problem - yet they continue to do nothing, except more studies," said Hedberg, his attorney.

The Department of Water Resources has not yet presented its case, but in court papers it says Cortopassi is wrong. Channel levels in the north Delta have been "basically stable" for two decades, and relying on the 1934 study is misleading, they said.

"Plaintiffs attempt to identify a trend by comparing only two points in time separated by 74 years for which plaintiffs either have no data or choose to ignore available data," state Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Reusch wrote.

Most of the mud in the river comes from the Mokelumne or Cosumnes watersheds - not as a result of State Water Project flows conveyed from the Sacramento River through the man-made Delta Cross Channel, Reusch argued. In other words, the state project is not responsible for whatever sediment does exist in Cortopassi's river.

Even if dredging were required by the judge, the state might not be able to fulfill that order, considering approval is required from upward of 11 local, state and federal agencies, Reusch wrote.